Log Buffer #140: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

This is the 140th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

Let us begin with Oracle this week. Dan Norris illustrates how to start database services automatically after instance startup. He says, “Services are an essential component for managing workload in a RAC environment. If you’re not defining any non-default services in your RAC database, you’re making a mistake.”

There’s some big MySQL news floating about in the offing, and Domas Mituzas provides some relevant links and a place to talk about it: the possibility of IBM acquiring Sun Microsystems. It’s just speculation and rumour now, but the very promise of it is too tantalizing to ignore. I imagine that the employees of MySQL—so newly moved to their new home at Sun—trembling at the prospect of another transition. Here are Craig Mullins’s thoughts: Will IBM Acquire Sun?

On MySQL Insights, Ivan Novick looks into the matter of auto increment stability: “The message here is not that the implementators of auto-increment have not done a good job, but that creating this functionality is actually really difficult. . . . I would recommend against using (it) in large-scale complex applications, unless you really know what you are doing and are accepting the limitations that exist.”

Josh Berkus and his readers variously ask and answer the question, how do I examine the Linux page cache? “I thought, if PostgreSQL has easy tools to monitor the contents and use of its cache, Linux must have some tool to examine the contents of the page cache, right? Wrong.”

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